Posts published by Susan Schulten

In March of 1864, William T. Sherman succeeded Ulysses S. Grant as the commanding general of the Military Division of the Mississippi. Grant, who had moved up to command all the Union armies, instructed Sherman to strike against Gen. Joseph E. Johnston’s army in Georgia, and then penetrate the deep interior of the Confederacy in order to inflict as much damage as possible on the resources that fueled the rebellion. These instructions became the basis for the Atlanta campaign, where Sherman’s three armies advanced from northwestern Georgia to Atlanta from May to September. Subsequently — and more notoriously — Sherman continued the assault by spreading his men into a moving front up to 60 miles wide as they marched to Savannah and then up through the Carolinas.

Whether we characterize Sherman’s campaign as excessive and brutal or necessary and swift, there is no question that it was among the most ambitious campaigns of the war, because to fulfill Grant’s directive, Sherman had to take his armies beyond the reach of Union supply lines. This was unthinkable to most contemporary generals, and required a superior body of cartographic intelligence. In short, Sherman needed maps.

Thanks to Capt. William Merrill, chief topographer of the Army of the Cumberland, Sherman got what he needed, and then some. By the summer of 1864 Merrill had assembled a crack team who continuously improved Union intelligence through fieldwork, traversing the land and collecting local knowledge. As a result they simply knew the terrain better than their counterparts, and mapped it with more detail, giving Sherman a decisive advantage as he closed in on Atlanta. These maps have been ably collected in the Sherman collection at the Library of Congress, and testify to the extraordinary work done by Merrill and his men, as well as by the Coast Survey, the primary federal mapping agency. Read more…

These days the intersection of cartography and Big Data is all the rage: Using information from the 2010 census, countless news outfits, including The New York Times, have created tools allowing readers to make customized maps of everything from trends in ethnic and racial composition to the dynamics of housing development. Indeed, we have come to expect that any large body of data will be visualized through maps and infographics. Such tools help to transform information into knowledge, and at their best allow us to see patterns that might otherwise be lost.

But while the technology may be new, the idea of mapping data in the United States can actually be traced to the Civil War. Earlier posts in Disunion have discussed the maps of slavery generated by the United States Coast Survey. At the same time, the Census Office (also part of the Treasury Department) was experimenting with maps of not just one but multiple types of data. These were designed to aid the Union war effort, but perhaps more importantly to plan for Reconstruction.

Long after the start of the Civil War, President Lincoln continued to believe that the Confederacy was home to a large population of Unionists, particularly in East Tennessee and western North Carolina. In the fall of 1861 he privately outlined a campaign to liberate these loyalists by seizing the Cumberland Gap, a passage through the Appalachian Mountains on the Tennessee-Kentucky border, and then moving south.

A few months later, in his first address to Congress, he proposed the construction of a railroad from Kentucky toward the Cumberland Gap or Knoxville, Tenn. in order to open communication and transportation with these Unionists — “the most valuable stake we have in the South.” And in January 1862 he pressed Gen. Don Carlos Buell to turn his attention from the hostile population of Nashville to points east, for “our friends in East Tennessee are being hanged and driven to despair.”

The problem for all these plans was the lack of information. The presence of Union sentiment in East Tennessee was explained by the absence of slavery as well as the fact that the region was somewhat isolated from the rest of the South by the Appalachians and the Cumberland Plateau. But that same forbidding terrain also left it beyond the reach of even the most intrepid surveyors. The basic topography of the eastern Tennessee River Valley was fairly clear, but the complex contours of the Blue Ridge and adjacent ranges of the Appalachian system were still unknown, and only vaguely represented on maps on the eve of the war. Read more…

Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was met with both roars of approval and curses of outrage. Many of the most vocal supporters spoke in moral and political terms, arguing that slavery was either a sin or an abuse of intrinsic human freedom. But a third case was made too, one often overlooked today: slavery had to end because it violated the laws of the free market.

The leading voice of this economic case for emancipation was Edward Atkinson, an agent and treasurer for several Northeastern cotton mills who knew more than anyone else about the financial and manufacturing aspects of the industry. He was an early member of the Free Soil Party, and soon after joined the newborn Republican Party in its quest to halt the expansion of slavery into the West. In 1859 he raised money to support John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, and just after the war began he joined the Boston Emancipation League. When it appeared that Britain and France might recognize the Confederacy, he was among the first to urgently advocate the destruction of slavery as the most direct way to end the rebellion before they did.

But Atkinson’s hatred of slavery was animated less by moral certainty or political conviction than by his ardent faith in free trade. In this respect he was at odds with many of his New England colleagues, most of whom believed that cotton profits depended upon slavery. Atkinson believed that cotton could be cultivated by whites and free blacks “with perfect ease and safety.” The fact that he had to make the case so forcefully should remind us that for many Americans, a South without slavery was simply unthinkable. Read more…

In July, Lincoln revealed to his cabinet his intent to emancipate slaves; in September he announced the policy to the entire nation. The proclamation applied only to states in rebellion, and excluded areas occupied by Union forces. Such limitations disheartened those who hoped for the destruction of slavery altogether. But Lincoln insisted that emancipation could only be considered constitutional as a military measure, and therefore could be deployed only to areas actively in rebellion. In other words, he thought very carefully about his constitutional power before making his proclamation.

By contrast, Lincoln worried little about curbing civil liberties to protect the war effort. As president he sharply limited freedom by suspending the writ of habeas corpus. The “great writ” forbade authorities to hold citizens indefinitely without being charged. This protection against tyranny was one of few that appeared in the original constitution, prior to the Bill of Rights. Read more…

In early 1862, Pvt. Robert Knox Sneden became a mapmaker for Gen. Samuel P. Heintzelman, commander of the III Corps of the Army of the Potomac. His maps, sketches and diary leave a vivid account of the growing brutality of the war, particularly at the late-July climax of Gen. George B. McClellan’s ill-fated Peninsula Campaign.

After the Battle of Savage’s Station on June 29, for example, Sneden recorded the overwhelming carnage, where even “the most humane man, with the strongest nerves, breathing for days the poisoned atmosphere of festering wounds, gazing on the most ghastly sights, and hearing the piercing shrieks of the patients while undergoing the operations, is absolutely compelled to shut his eyes.” The battle over, the Union Army abandoned supplies and more than 2,000 sick and wounded men in the face of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s offensive. Read more…

Wartime emancipation was a tangled story of incremental steps by Congress, the president, and the Union Army and acts of supreme bravery of the part of slaves. In August 1861, just three months after the onset of hostilities, Congress granted federal authorities the right to confiscate slaves used to aid the rebellion, yet the act did not guarantee these slaves permanent freedom, and in fact the Fugitive Slave Law was still in place. The following March, Congress barred the military from returning fugitive slaves to their masters, and began to pressure Lincoln to take more drastic action.

In April 1862, Congress “discharged” the 3,000 slaves held in the District of Columbia, then eased the fallout by compensating slaveholders for their property and appropriating $100,000 for the voluntary colonization of these former slaves. Yet the District of Columbia is a speck of land on the nation’s map. Two months later, on June 19, 1862, Congress took similar action on a much grander scale by signing an order that permanently ended slavery in all the federal territories, which then constituted over 40 percent of the nation’s land. Read more…

Gen. George B. McClellan’s amphibious invasion of the Virginia Peninsula in March and April 1862 involved one of the great logistical achievements of the Civil War. By April 2 he had amassed 58,000 men, 15,000 horses and mules, 1,100 wagons and 44 batteries, along with extensive supplies and telegraph wire — and more troops were on the way.

But McClellan did not appreciate the land of the Peninsula, particularly the sandy roads that quickly turned to mud when heavy rains fell in early April. These conditions were worsened by his reliance on a map drawn for the invasion that was horribly flawed. The map had been drawn under the direction of Maj. Gen. John Wool, commander of the Department of Virginia and in charge of Fort Monroe, the Union-held installation at the tip of the Peninsula. Read more…

Though there was little organized fighting along the Union defenses around Washington, they were continuously harassed by Southern skirmishers through the latter half of 1861 and into 1862. The situation was particularly troublesome in southern Fairfax County, Va., not far from Mount Vernon and Alexandria. Rebels repeatedly challenged the Union pickets and effectively blockaded the Potomac River, which enabled them to smuggle mail and other materials across the river from Maryland.

The capital’s vulnerability to the south was worsened by the scarcity of reliable maps, prompting Gen. Winfield Scott to begin a comprehensive mapping effort in the summer of 1861. The Union defeat at Bull Run derailed the effort for a time, but by the end of the year the Coast Survey and the Office of Topographical Engineers had produced an impressive map of northeastern Virginia. Issued on New Year’s Day 1862, it was the first large and detailed map of the area, drawn from existing sources as well as new surveys. Read more…

The advent of the Internet has prompted endless claims that we are living through an unprecedented revolution in communication, one that has annihilated the concept of distance. Yet the real revolution came with the arrival of the telegraph in the 19th century.

The innovations of Joseph Henry and Samuel F.B. Morse, among others, led to the first telegraphed message in 1844, and by the late 1850s President Buchanan was famously exchanging pleasantries with Queen Victoria. Over 50,000 miles of telegraph wire were strung across the country in the prior two decades, and by November 1861 a transcontinental network was complete. Read more…